There was only one problem with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 2024 Report to Congress on Robocalls and the Transmission of Misleading or Inaccurate Caller Identification Information. It omitted all the data that should have been included for 2024. The US comms regulator is legally required to issue a report to the US government about this topic every year. However, the authors of their latest report somehow concluded they need not include data about the work that the FCC did in 2024, and barely any new data that had not already been included in their 2023 report.
You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to notice the remarkable difference between the 2024 report and the equivalent reports produced in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Previous reports included data on topics like the number of fines issued to illegal robocallers up until the end of November. The end of November is a reasonable cut-off date for data in a report that the FCC has always issued in late December. The difference with the 2024 report is that it included no data pertaining to 2024. The only substantial difference between the 2023 and 2024 reports is that the latter includes new data covering December 2023. So whilst each previous report presented Congress with new information covering a full 12-month period, the 2024 report is effectively the 2023 report plus data for just one month.
Experience shows that American lobbyists and FCC cronies will lie about the facts I have just stated, even though the reports are in the public domain and anyone can check them. So let us look at some extracts that describe the FCC’s enforcement activities. Decide for yourself if data that had routinely been included in previous reports was excluded from the information given to Congress in 2024.
Here is what the 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 reports had to say about all the forfeiture orders (i.e. fines) that the FCC issued to robocallers. The first extract is from the 2021 report to Congress, dated December 22, 2021:
D. Forfeiture Orders
The Commission issued two forfeiture orders during the preceding calendar year (2020) for violations of section 227(b)-(e)… The Commission issued two forfeiture orders between January 1, 2021 and November 30, 2021 for violations of section 227(b)-(e).
This is from the same section of the 2022 report to Congress, dated December 23, 2022:
D. Forfeiture Orders
The Commission issued two forfeiture orders during the preceding calendar year (2021) for violations of section 227(b)-(e)… The Commission issued no forfeiture orders between January 1, 2022 and November 30, 2022, for violations of section 227(b)-(e).
This is from the same section of the 2023 report to Congress, dated December 27, 2023:
D. Forfeiture Orders
The Commission did not issue any forfeiture orders during the preceding calendar year (2022) for violations of section 227(b)-(e). The Commission issued three forfeiture orders between January 1, 2023 and November 30, 2023, for violations of section 227(b)-(e).
And finally, here is the same section of the 2024 report to Congress, dated December 27, 2024:
D. Forfeiture Orders
In 2023, the Commission issued three forfeiture orders for violations of section 227(b)-(e).
Did you spot the difference? The same inconsistency occurs in every other section of the report. It even occurs when you might think the trend would suggest that the FCC would want to highlight improvements. For example, here are the tables about consumer complaints about potential robocall violations from the 2023 report (above) and 2024 report (below).
In 2024, the FCC evidently chose a dramatically different interpretation of how to satisfy its legal obligation to report to Congress on robocalls and spoofing. My guess is that the discord between FCC bragging about ‘crackdowns’ on robocallers and the trivial number of fines it actually issues had become a political embarrassment. The FCC is a highly politicized regulator; the return of Donald Trump as President and the overall election victory of the Republican Party spelled the end for former FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat appointee. Rosenworcel spent years castigating her Republican predecessor for not being tough enough on illegal robocallers. Admitting to yet another year when hardly any illegal robocallers suffered any consequences for their crimes would not embellish Rosenworcel’s résumé as a protector of the public.
Commsrisk observed last year that the there is a huge discrepancy between the FCC’s rhetoric and the number of times it actually enforces regulations about illegal robocalls and CLI spoofing. I was looking forward to hammering the point this year, so I am irked that the FCC has dodged criticism by not even reporting on its own woeful performance. It was in November 2024 that I had a public spat with former FCC lawyer Josh Bercu, who appears to have been appointed to a role where he will fly to foreign countries and insist they should trace the origin of illegal calls because the USA has had great success in punishing the people responsible. That argument is made ridiculous by the observation that the US comms regulator almost never punishes anybody. He repeated a claim that was also made by several other American lobbyists during 2024: the US is succeeding because it is punishing the people responsible for illegal calls. Bercu and I argued publicly about his claim, just as I have argued publicly with other American lobbyists that make the same claim. If the claim is true, then where is the evidence to support it? And why would the FCC not issue a report to government highlighting the cases where calls had been traced to their origin and somebody got punished as a consequence?
Kinder readers may speculate that excluding so much data about robocalls from a report to Congress could simply represent a loss of interest in the topic at the FCC, or be due to the outgoing leadership having nothing left to say about it. The reality is that the looming transition from Democrat to Republican control of the FCC prompted departing FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel and her underlings to issue numerous upbeat statements about their legacy, including the work they had done to tackle robocalls. The FCC ‘recap’ of its public security efforts that was issued on January 15 stated they had…
…cracked down on those behind junk calling schemes…
The Commission mandated technology to stop illegal call spoofing; advanced rules that enable the Commission to red flag phone numbers and mandated carriers to block texts from flagged numbers; issued a first-of-its-kind $6 million Forfeiture Order for the first generative AI and audio deepfake call impersonating President Joe Biden during the New Hampshire primary; adopted the blocking of illegal robotexts; issued Consumer Communications Information Service Threats against bad actors who persistently facilitated illegal robocalls aimed at defrauding and harming consumers, requiring all other providers to stop carrying their calls; and established new partnerships with 49 states, DC and Guam’s attorneys general and international counterparts in the fight against robocalls.
This recap refers to one robocall campaign that was penalized, although the FCC repeats its previous misdirection by claiming the robocaller was punished for using deepfake technology. The robocaller did not violate any FCC rules about deepfakes because the FCC had no rules about deepfakes. The actual rule that was violated related to the robocaller spoofing the caller ID of a prominent Democrat politician. It does not sound good to brag about technology that ‘stops’ illegal call spoofing and then immediately refer to a fine that was issued because that technology does not actually stop illegal call spoofing. Draw your own conclusions about why the recap does not mention any other punishments for robocallers that were sought or imposed by the FCC across the whole of 2024. I certainly never saw any FCC announcements about other fines issued to robocallers, and I monitor their announcements every day. A ‘crackdown’ that resulted in fines for only one illegal robocall campaign across the whole of 2024 sounds like a pretty meager crackdown to me.
That was not even the first occasion that the FCC’s leadership congratulated itself for ‘cracking down’ on robocallers during 2024. Rosenworcel issued her personal review of 2024 just a few days after the publication of the robocall progress report to Congress. She claimed:
We also cracked down on spoofed robocalls by bolstering the integrity of our caller ID authentication framework, which allows service providers to verify that the caller ID information you see on your phone is legitimate.
It seems strange to boast about a crackdown on spoofed robocalls in an informal announcement designed to capture the attention of journalists only four days after neglecting to present hard data about this supposed crackdown in a mandatory report to government. And it is doubly strange that the only robocall campaign that resulted in a fine is the one campaign that proved the caller ID information shown on an American handset can still be misleading.
The truth is that the US legal system is a dysfunctional mess, and the careers of lawyers like Rosenworcel and Bercu depends on them pretending the opposite. Putting in place the infrastructure to identify criminals is a laudable goal. However, it does not act as a deterrent if the criminals know they will never be punished! Activities like tracing calls and mandating expenditure on technology serve as a smokescreen for the problem at the heart of the US approach, which resides in their utter inability to deter crime.
Without the threat of punishment, criminals will just keep coming back again and again, experimenting with new ways to scam the public. Repeating the FCC’s propaganda may make some well-paid goons feel good about themselves, and may fill some empty inches in news columns, but it does not actually protect the public from harm. The world could do with more leadership in coordinating the international struggle against scam calls and messages. However, the US is not capable of providing that leadership. I hope that Europe will fill the void, and there are positive signs that they can. Progress in protecting Americans from scams is hindered by political division and a broken legal sysem. And the US comms regulator cannot even be trusted to tell the US government about the work it has or has not done.
The FCC’s 2024 Report to Congress on Robocalls and the Transmission of Misleading or Inaccurate Caller Identification Information can be found here. For comparison, the 2023 report is here, the 2022 report is here, and the 2021 report is here.
